Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios
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@flaxking said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@wrx7m said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@flaxking said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
The ERP's dependency might be actually be ACE, and not Excel itself
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=54920Hmm. I don't know about that. We don't have access installed on the ERP server or any of the other systems.
It's a shared DLL, just installing Excel would install it on a system
That's some pretty crappy software using that engine if that's the case.
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@Dashrender said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@flaxking said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@wrx7m said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@flaxking said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
The ERP's dependency might be actually be ACE, and not Excel itself
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=54920Hmm. I don't know about that. We don't have access installed on the ERP server or any of the other systems.
It's a shared DLL, just installing Excel would install it on a system
That's some pretty crappy software using that engine if that's the case.
If they specifically want to create a feature which is an integration with Microsoft Excel, should they not use the tools provided by Microsoft to do so?
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@flaxking said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@Dashrender said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@flaxking said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@wrx7m said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@flaxking said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
The ERP's dependency might be actually be ACE, and not Excel itself
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=54920Hmm. I don't know about that. We don't have access installed on the ERP server or any of the other systems.
It's a shared DLL, just installing Excel would install it on a system
That's some pretty crappy software using that engine if that's the case.
If they specifically want to create a feature which is an integration with Microsoft Excel, should they not use the tools provided by Microsoft to do so?
Absolutely not. That's considered one of the biggest, most amateur and/or "don't care about users" programming blunders. It's one of the most common red flags for bad software. Calling it the "tools provided by Microsoft" makes it sound logical, but when you describe it as "tools provided by Microsoft that require the end users to purchase, maintain, support, and constant fix integration with a tertiary product", then it is clear why only a total idiot or truly uncaring developer would do it. And as it is the second most well known "total screw up" for software development inclusions, there is absolutely no viable excuse for a programmer doing it (the most well known is hard coding to SQL Server for no reason.)
This is one of the standard "free for developers, screws the customer" tools that is used as the industry wide example of how lazy developers are lured into making bad software in order to forcible funnel money into a vendor. And it raises the actual cost of the end product, while generally making it flaky and unstable. We make a fortune supporting software that works this way because the MS Office products deregister or have problems all of the time and it is impossible for the software makers to support it. It literally makes their software "not work" reliably.
It's also one of the most common examples of what huge blunders happen when developers get to make decisions without the insight and oversight of operations teams. Because using these tools is easy for the devs, at the cost of totally screwing the end users and operations teams.
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@scottalanmiller It's good to not only include the MS Tool for perhaps features that nothing else supports (among many other reasons) , but also the FOSS stuff too. Not just the MS stuff, that is very idiotic.
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@Obsolesce said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@scottalanmiller It's good to not only include the MS Tool for perhaps features that nothing else supports (among many other reasons) , but also the FOSS stuff too. Not just the MS stuff, that is very idiotic.
That's also true. I know loads of companies that get screwed with this stuff and have zero intention to use it with MS products, that's just how people talk about it. They want a CSV, for example, not Excel. But the majority of people call CSVs an "Excel file" adding to the confusion.
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@wrx7m said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@Obsolesce said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@wrx7m said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
Scenario 1
You need to install O365 on that machine using the shared option. Forget the name atm, not at a PC.
What happens is when they log on to the computer, office asks them to log in.
They'll need to have their own login for that computer.
Technically, doing it this way is the only allowed way to do it. You must specifically install the shared version of office.
Edit: found the link
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/overview-of-shared-computer-activation-for-office-365-proplusI have read that, and the shared activation is for proplus. We have business premium. So, we would have to assign users with proplus licensing. However, a chat with MS last night yielded no solution. Sure, you can use proplus to do this, but what about if you have those same users that have office 365 mailboxes/exchange online with business premium? They couldn't answer that.
I read that MS has expanded the selections that can do shared activation somewhere. I want to say that happened in April? Here we go MS blog about the change.
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@NDC said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@wrx7m said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@Obsolesce said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@wrx7m said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
Scenario 1
You need to install O365 on that machine using the shared option. Forget the name atm, not at a PC.
What happens is when they log on to the computer, office asks them to log in.
They'll need to have their own login for that computer.
Technically, doing it this way is the only allowed way to do it. You must specifically install the shared version of office.
Edit: found the link
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/overview-of-shared-computer-activation-for-office-365-proplusI have read that, and the shared activation is for proplus. We have business premium. So, we would have to assign users with proplus licensing. However, a chat with MS last night yielded no solution. Sure, you can use proplus to do this, but what about if you have those same users that have office 365 mailboxes/exchange online with business premium? They couldn't answer that.
I read that MS has expanded the selections that can do shared activation somewhere. I want to say that happened in April? Here we go MS blog about the change.
Boom, win.
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@JaredBusch said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@NDC said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@wrx7m said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@Obsolesce said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@wrx7m said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
Scenario 1
You need to install O365 on that machine using the shared option. Forget the name atm, not at a PC.
What happens is when they log on to the computer, office asks them to log in.
They'll need to have their own login for that computer.
Technically, doing it this way is the only allowed way to do it. You must specifically install the shared version of office.
Edit: found the link
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/overview-of-shared-computer-activation-for-office-365-proplusI have read that, and the shared activation is for proplus. We have business premium. So, we would have to assign users with proplus licensing. However, a chat with MS last night yielded no solution. Sure, you can use proplus to do this, but what about if you have those same users that have office 365 mailboxes/exchange online with business premium? They couldn't answer that.
I read that MS has expanded the selections that can do shared activation somewhere. I want to say that happened in April? Here we go MS blog about the change.
Boom, win.
Which links right to the article I posted 3 days ago...
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@Obsolesce said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@JaredBusch said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@NDC said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@wrx7m said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@Obsolesce said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@wrx7m said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
Scenario 1
You need to install O365 on that machine using the shared option. Forget the name atm, not at a PC.
What happens is when they log on to the computer, office asks them to log in.
They'll need to have their own login for that computer.
Technically, doing it this way is the only allowed way to do it. You must specifically install the shared version of office.
Edit: found the link
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/overview-of-shared-computer-activation-for-office-365-proplusI have read that, and the shared activation is for proplus. We have business premium. So, we would have to assign users with proplus licensing. However, a chat with MS last night yielded no solution. Sure, you can use proplus to do this, but what about if you have those same users that have office 365 mailboxes/exchange online with business premium? They couldn't answer that.
I read that MS has expanded the selections that can do shared activation somewhere. I want to say that happened in April? Here we go MS blog about the change.
Boom, win.
Which links right to the article I posted 3 days ago...
Sorry saw a bunch of links to info about shared activation but missed that one. Yup already covered I guess.
@Obsolesce said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@JaredBusch said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@NDC said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@wrx7m said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@Obsolesce said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@wrx7m said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
Scenario 1
You need to install O365 on that machine using the shared option. Forget the name atm, not at a PC.
What happens is when they log on to the computer, office asks them to log in.
They'll need to have their own login for that computer.
Technically, doing it this way is the only allowed way to do it. You must specifically install the shared version of office.
Edit: found the link
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/overview-of-shared-computer-activation-for-office-365-proplusI have read that, and the shared activation is for proplus. We have business premium. So, we would have to assign users with proplus licensing. However, a chat with MS last night yielded no solution. Sure, you can use proplus to do this, but what about if you have those same users that have office 365 mailboxes/exchange online with business premium? They couldn't answer that.
I read that MS has expanded the selections that can do shared activation somewhere. I want to say that happened in April? Here we go MS blog about the change.
Boom, win.
Which links right to the article I posted 3 days ago...
Ah indeed upon review it would appear I didn't look closely enough before posting. Sorry.
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@NDC said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@wrx7m said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@Obsolesce said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@wrx7m said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
Scenario 1
You need to install O365 on that machine using the shared option. Forget the name atm, not at a PC.
What happens is when they log on to the computer, office asks them to log in.
They'll need to have their own login for that computer.
Technically, doing it this way is the only allowed way to do it. You must specifically install the shared version of office.
Edit: found the link
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/overview-of-shared-computer-activation-for-office-365-proplusI have read that, and the shared activation is for proplus. We have business premium. So, we would have to assign users with proplus licensing. However, a chat with MS last night yielded no solution. Sure, you can use proplus to do this, but what about if you have those same users that have office 365 mailboxes/exchange online with business premium? They couldn't answer that.
I read that MS has expanded the selections that can do shared activation somewhere. I want to say that happened in April? Here we go MS blog about the change.
That is Microsoft 365 Business, not Office 365
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@wrx7m said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@NDC said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@wrx7m said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@Obsolesce said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@wrx7m said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
Scenario 1
You need to install O365 on that machine using the shared option. Forget the name atm, not at a PC.
What happens is when they log on to the computer, office asks them to log in.
They'll need to have their own login for that computer.
Technically, doing it this way is the only allowed way to do it. You must specifically install the shared version of office.
Edit: found the link
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/overview-of-shared-computer-activation-for-office-365-proplusI have read that, and the shared activation is for proplus. We have business premium. So, we would have to assign users with proplus licensing. However, a chat with MS last night yielded no solution. Sure, you can use proplus to do this, but what about if you have those same users that have office 365 mailboxes/exchange online with business premium? They couldn't answer that.
I read that MS has expanded the selections that can do shared activation somewhere. I want to say that happened in April? Here we go MS blog about the change.
That is Microsoft 365 Business, not Office 365
Yep - I read, though don't know if I commented that it was "Microsoft 365" not "Office 365" back when originally posted.. which is why I kept digging for more specific links on what versions allowed it.
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@Dashrender said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@wrx7m said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@Dashrender said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@JaredBusch said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@Dashrender said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@Obsolesce said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@wrx7m said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
Scenario 3
Either yes you can install the perpetual version on the server and then users can generate the reports, or it was done incorrectly at my last job by the ERP consultant.
Not sure a typical perpetual version can be used - I thought it had to be a VL version installed on the RDS server - of course, one license per person (not connection, but per user) who logs into RDS. Basically all RDS users will have to have two licenses - a VL Office license, and a O356 license. Or upgrade those users to E3 (I think) to use shared office o365 on RDS.
You don't need E3. All of the Office 365 packages that offer the full version offer multiple devices.
Once again - multi device is not the as what's required for RDS (which is shared activation) which you don't get with BP, so you must have E3 or higher.
That chart you linked to in the previous post doesn't list E3 or higher in that matrix. Did you see something that shows E3 or higher will allow shared computer activation/are considered proplus plans?
I didn't look for a link - I know we've talked about it before here and E3 definitely qualifies... I know once upon a time it didn't but that was changed a few years ago.
I did find a link talking about Microsoft 365 (not O365, but M365) does support shared activation.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-365-Business-Blog/Shared-Computer-Activation-for-Office-in-Microsoft-365-Business/ba-p/472994yeah I mention that that link is M, not O here.
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@scottalanmiller said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@flaxking said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@Dashrender said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@flaxking said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@wrx7m said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@flaxking said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
The ERP's dependency might be actually be ACE, and not Excel itself
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=54920Hmm. I don't know about that. We don't have access installed on the ERP server or any of the other systems.
It's a shared DLL, just installing Excel would install it on a system
That's some pretty crappy software using that engine if that's the case.
If they specifically want to create a feature which is an integration with Microsoft Excel, should they not use the tools provided by Microsoft to do so?
Absolutely not. That's considered one of the biggest, most amateur and/or "don't care about users" programming blunders. It's one of the most common red flags for bad software. Calling it the "tools provided by Microsoft" makes it sound logical, but when you describe it as "tools provided by Microsoft that require the end users to purchase, maintain, support, and constant fix integration with a tertiary product", then it is clear why only a total idiot or truly uncaring developer would do it. And as it is the second most well known "total screw up" for software development inclusions, there is absolutely no viable excuse for a programmer doing it (the most well known is hard coding to SQL Server for no reason.)
This is one of the standard "free for developers, screws the customer" tools that is used as the industry wide example of how lazy developers are lured into making bad software in order to forcible funnel money into a vendor. And it raises the actual cost of the end product, while generally making it flaky and unstable. We make a fortune supporting software that works this way because the MS Office products deregister or have problems all of the time and it is impossible for the software makers to support it. It literally makes their software "not work" reliably.
It's also one of the most common examples of what huge blunders happen when developers get to make decisions without the insight and oversight of operations teams. Because using these tools is easy for the devs, at the cost of totally screwing the end users and operations teams.
I think you must be missing what's going on here. This removes the requirement to integrate more directly with MS Office, instead relying on a separate library that is provided standalone from Office and thus allows saving to Excel. We've had zero issues with using this library, which is actually pretty uncommon for us.
We do support saving to CSV, but people specifically want excel, and believe it or not, they actually get confused by CSVs. I think this is thanks to how Excel implements CSVs, as well as poor spreadsheet training courses, as well as people who probably aren't qualified to touch a computer.
Honestly, our program is built on a series of poor choices, but I don't think this is really one of them.
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@flaxking said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
We do support saving to CSV, but people specifically want excel, and believe it or not, they actually get confused by CSVs.
CSV is a native format to Excel. If they are confused by it, it's Excel that they are confused by. So Excel would be their problem there.
Not that I'm saying CSV should be used, by point being that they are claiming that they need to work using Excel, and then don't understand Excel basics. It's a problematic combination.
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@flaxking said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
I think you must be missing what's going on here. This removes the requirement to integrate more directly with MS Office, instead relying on a separate library that is provided standalone from Office and thus allows saving to Excel. We've had zero issues with using this library, which is actually pretty uncommon for us.
The issue is flexibility. Using third party libraries, you can integrate with Excel or with anything else. Using the Office libraries, every user, in ever system, is bound by the limitations of the most problematic. It makes deployments more costly, and more complex.
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@Obsolesce said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@scottalanmiller It's good to not only include the MS Tool for perhaps features that nothing else supports (among many other reasons) , but also the FOSS stuff too. Not just the MS stuff, that is very idiotic.
That, too. Those MS Office integrations don't support other tools. So it is a huge lock in. It might work well (although I've never seen this) if you have 100% MS Office installed and it never has any issues itself (never seen that either), but anyone wanting an alternative is totally out of luck.
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@scottalanmiller said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
@flaxking said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:
I think you must be missing what's going on here. This removes the requirement to integrate more directly with MS Office, instead relying on a separate library that is provided standalone from Office and thus allows saving to Excel. We've had zero issues with using this library, which is actually pretty uncommon for us.
The issue is flexibility. Using third party libraries, you can integrate with Excel or with anything else. Using the Office libraries, every user, in ever system, is bound by the limitations of the most problematic. It makes deployments more costly, and more complex.
That's true, it's the kind of self perpetuating lock-in that has served Microsoft so well. People use Excel, and they ask for saving to Excel spreadsheet, so we create the integration specially to allow Excel and not include ODF, then we help keep the industry locked into using Excel because that's all we support unless you want to just save to CSV.
As for the cost and complexity of deployments... that could be true, except that the installation of our main software is already so complex and costly that dealing with potentially installing this library is the easiest part. I think we probably only have one other developer who would be able to figure out how to install it. I've never heard of any client's IT that have been able to figure out how to install it (just calls from those who have tried), client services has to do literally every install.
